‘The Invention of the Eastern Question’ by Ozan Ozavcı review

Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 was, of course, not the first time the peninsula was forced to take centre stage in a geopolitical struggle with global implications. Towards the close of the 18th century this unlucky Black Sea territory became a flash point for tensions between the Russian and Ottoman empires, the results of which have reverberated well into the 21st century. It was this struggle between St Petersburg and Istanbul that gave rise to the so-called ‘Eastern Question’: what should be done about the ailing Ottoman Empire?

This, at least, is the argument made in Ozan Ozavcı’s new book. While many studies of the late Ottoman Empire reference St Petersburg’s annexation of Crimea in 1783 as a crucial milestone in the Islamic polity’s demise, Ozavcı uses this incident as the starting point for a study of the active – but often overlooked – role played by Istanbul in geopolitical tensions at the turn of the 19th century. The ‘Eastern Question’ – a term coined in 1822 during the congress of Verona, part of a series of congresses convened after the Napoleonic Wars – is often understood as pertaining to the issue of what the European powers should do with the power vacuum created by the Ottoman Empire’s inevitable demise. However, like most historians of the late Ottoman Empire writing today, Ozavcı rejects the Ottoman decline thesis – that after a 16th-century golden age, the Empire entered an unstoppable period of stagnation – as anachronistic. The ‘sick man of Europe’ was under the weather but not terminal. Instead, he argues, the ‘Eastern Question’ should be seen as relating to the uncertainty experienced by diplomats and politicians in London, Paris, St Petersburg, Istanbul, and further afield when it came to how to respond to the relative weakness of the once mighty Sublime Porte.

One of those diplomats was Robert Liston, Britain’s Scottish ambassador to Istanbul in 1794-5 and 1812-20. Liston was both a witness and a player in the diplomatic wranglings of his age, playing a particularly important role arbitrating between the Russian and Ottoman empires: ‘two proud nations’ as he described the imperial behemoths. The scene for these Russo-Ottoman tensions was set long before Liston and his wife Henrietta arrived in Pera, the diplomatic quarter of Istanbul. In fact, the ground had been prepared before Russia’s annexation of Crimea. During the 16th century a new idea began to flourish in Russia: Muscovy as the Third Rome, successor to the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium and the true protector of Christendom. As the Russian monk Philotheus of Pskov declared in the early 16th century: ‘two Romes have fallen, the Third stands and there shall be no Fourth’. Armed with this new imperial ideology Muscovy, and later the Russian Empire, sought to expand into the Balkans and the Caucasus to counter the threat from Tartar raiders and to push its borders as far south and west as it could get away with. The Ottoman Empire, which itself had expanded at a rapid rate over the previous two centuries with land-hungry sultans such as Selim I and Suleiman I (‘the Magnificent’), could not abide such a threat on its doorstep.

Border skirmishes between the two eventually escalated into the ‘Great Turkish War’ (1683-99) which saw Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, Venice, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ranged against the Ottomans. The congress of Karlowitz, convened to settle the conflict, saw Russia emerge as a member of the pan-European international system and also pivot in its policy towards the Ottomans from defence to offence. Though it would not emerge as a recognised term until more than a century later, it was at Karlowitz that the ‘Eastern Question’ began to form, Ozavcı argues.

Fast forward to the turn of the 19th century and inter-imperial tensions between the Ottoman and Russian empires, most of which resulted from disputes over territory, commercial treaties, and the rights of minorities, was a central concern for diplomats. While Russia sought expansion and access to the Mediterranean, Britain’s main concern was to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire to ensure its routes to India and the rest of its empire. Ozavcı, who painstakingly reconstructs the negotiations carried out during this period, shows how Liston spent much of his time offering counsel to representatives of both empires in an attempt to prevent the eruption of an open conflict. This was no easy task. At one point, with neither side cooperating, Liston characterised the Sublime Porte as ‘overbearing and unjust’, while he also felt that everything would be better if Tsar Alexander I simply renounced ‘all projects of external acquisition or encroachment’.

If Karlowitz was the genesis of the ‘Eastern Question’, it really took shape in the period after the Napoleonic Wars. At the Congress of Vienna, convened after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, Liston joined a chorus of diplomats who insisted the Ottomans send a representative to defend their interests. The Sublime Porte refused: ‘They viewed European legal frameworks, including those introduced at Vienna, as biased instruments that favoured powerful nations, perpetuating a system that compromised Ottoman independence’, Ozavcı writes. Such fears would prove well founded.

Differing answers to the ‘Eastern Question’ were responsible for igniting one of the 19th century’s major conflicts. The Crimean War (1853-56) began as a dispute over who should protect Christians in Ottoman Palestine – France or Russia – before blowing up into war with Russia on one side and the Ottomans, Britain, and France on the other, the latter two trying to preserve the former. But as the Ottomans had feared in 1815, the Great Powers repeatedly intervened in its lands until its territories were divided between Britain and France or became independent states after the First World War. Had the Sublime Porte sent a representative to Vienna, might things have been different?

• The Invention of the Eastern Question: Sir Robert Liston and Ottoman Diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions
  Ozan Ozavcı
  I.B. Tauris, 224pp, £85
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

William Eichler writes on the history and politics of the late Ottoman Empire, Israel, Palestine, and Turkey.